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Andrew Perfors

@andyperfors.bsky.social

11K followers 5K following 3.2K posts

Prof at UniMelb. I'm a computational cognitive scientist studying human inference, learning, information systems, culture, and (mis/dis)info. Nerd & opinionated loudmouth in Oz, originally from America, citizen of both. Parent of two. 🏳️‍⚧️ perfors.net

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · Apr 29

I wrote an article about the psychology by which disinformation campaigns work, with examples from anti-trans propaganda. It's not just about individual beliefs, but also the way our institutions and norms are manipulated.

Please read and share!

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/Ant...?

Anti-trans attitudes have existed for years, but organised disinformation campaigns are increasingly driving them

Disinformation exists across all parts of the political spectrum, but it goes far beyond simple lying when it comes to the campaign against the transgender community, says a University of Melbourne ex...

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au

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Musa Okwonga @okwonga.bsky.social · 1h

“Far from comprehensive, the list does not include the thousands still buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, as well as the war’s many indirect victims.”

Lea Ypi @leaypi.bsky.social · 2h

no words

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

www.theguardian.com

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Chris Morran @themorrancave.bsky.social · 1h

NEW: As Linda McMahon guts the Dept. of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how future kids will learn -- seeking to dismantle the public school system in favor of private and Christian schools or homeschooling.

These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.

Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of publ...

www.propublica.org

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 2h

This is good and worth reading.

Andrea Stocco @andreastocco.com · 5h

A recent Nature paper has introduced Centaur, a LLAMA-based LLM that surpasses any cognitive models in predicting human behavior. Is this the ultimate unified theory of cognition? In this preprint, my colleagues and I expressed our doubts. Let us know what you think! arxiv.org/abs/2510.03311

Not Even Wrong: On the Limits of Prediction as Explanation in Cognitive Science

We offer a comment on the Centaur (Binz et al., 2025) transformer-based model of human behavior. In particular, Centaur was cast as a path towards unified theories of cognition. We offer a counter cla...

arxiv.org

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Rob Hawkes @robbhawkes.bsky.social · 4d

As more of my valued colleagues face the threat of redundancy, here’s a quick reminder that it takes years and years of public investment to train an academic. Cutting someone with this wealth of experience loose isn’t “saving” anything. It is a massive waste of our collective resources.

UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance

by Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. Just da…

moneyontheleft.org

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Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences @psychunimelb.bsky.social · 6h

Education at Melbourne interviewed Professor @andyperfors.bsky.social, Director of the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, and Academic Lead, LGBTIQA+ Inclusion at the University.

Read it here: go.unimelb.edu.au/t3qp

Storytelling, stats, and helping everyone belong with Andy Perfors

go.unimelb.edu.au

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 13h

This is a really lovely, informative, and heartwarming thread about -- of all things -- working in an airport.

I love that the world is full of fractal coolness like this: whatever mundane thing you can think of is packed with insight and humour if you only take the time to notice it.

Nome @nome.bsky.social · 1d

Some things I've learned in my first few weeks:

1) There is a grey market candy swapping racket between janitors, TSA agents, CSRs, and everyone else who has to stand someplace all day at the airport.

Hi-chews, sour candies, and gummy anything are in highest demand.

Reposted by Andrew Perfors

Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 21h

New from me and @brendannyhan.bsky.social

Why Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence" is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain.

Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.

www.msnbc.com

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Zack Ford @zackford.bsky.social · 21h

These Supreme Court oral arguments on conversion therapy are going to be painful. No matter what is said, know that trying to force someone to be what they're not is psychological torture with measurable negative consequences, and anyone trying to defend such efforts is a bigoted monster.

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 19h

more and more I am convinced a good share of why Trump 2 is so much worse than before is because of what Elon did to Twitter. it's like those group chats where people gassed themselves up to join ISIS, scaled up a millionfold

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Brian Tyler Cohen @briantylercohen.bsky.social · 17h

This is Adelita Grijalva.

She was elected to Congress two weeks ago, officially making her the final vote needed to force the release of the Epstein files.

She has still not been sworn in because Mike Johnson refuses to do so.

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 23h

Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 1d

quantitative methods, qualitative methods, mixed methods

Photo of a Kansas City Chiefs press conference with Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, and Patrick Mahomes. Reid is wearing a gray suit and red tie with a lapel pin. Kelce is wearing a camp-style short-sleeved shirt with a bird print, along with a suede cap, and Mahomes is wearing a white collared shirt, a pink checkered double-breasted vest, and a pale pink tie.

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Teresa Völker @tevoelker.bsky.social · 1d

New paper out with @dasalgon.bsky.social: “Far-Right Agenda Setting: How the Far Right influences the Political Mainstream” doi.org/10.1017/S1475676525100066 #openaccess in @ejprjournal.bsky.social🧵

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 1d

That is such a great definition of supremacy!

Reposted by Andrew Perfors

Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 1d

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 1d

Hopefully the whole Bari Weiss thing and Ezra Klein thing starts waking people up to the fact that corporate media is mostly populated with mediocre people who have made millions and gained unbelievable influence because they threaten nothing and tell wealthy people exactly what they want to hear.

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 1d

Something fundamental has broken in the brains of elites. No matter how many op-eds they read, write and publish denouncing identity politics, they still think it's a heterodox viewpoint you can't find anywhere.

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 1d

I had a liberal centrist — a professional — once tell me that they engage with more diversity at a Bari Weiss dinner party than they do in any mainstream media event.

I mention this because, just as it is true in politics at the moment, some of the calls are coming from inside the house.

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Drop Site @dropsitenews.com · 1d

Greta:

"I will never comprehend how humans can be so evil. That you would deliberately starve millions of people living trapped under an illegal siege as a continuation of decades of oppression and apartheid.”

Source: Global Sumud Flotilla via X

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Ian Gordon @idgordon.bsky.social · 1d

If you'd like to delight in a side-by-side comparison, here's Bari Weiss' reported note to CBS staffers (left) and the one I cooked up on ChatGPT with a quickly dashed-off prompt (right). Looking forward to hearing from you in the days and weeks ahead!

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 1d

This is exactly right too. Oh heck just read the whole thing

And as for winning, I think it is an indictment even of Klein's apparent intelligence that he thinks that the way to persuade people to join the Democrats is to have Democrats abandon what are their alleged ideals, especially since they just lost so badly not by standing up for trans people, but by doing exactly what Ezra Klein is now proposing, because they listened to people like Ezra Klein.

You can't beat the mentality that leads to abuse by taking on the abuser's mentality. You can't defeat bad ideas by adopting them. You can't grow a coalition by selling out its members. And you can't persuade people who disagree with you that you can be trusted to fight for them when you won't even fight for those you say are with you.

Eventually you have to stand for something, or somebody else will tell you where to stand, and if you'd rather not, they'll force you to stand there, and stand there you will.

And there you'll be, standing in a place somebody else chose for you. You and the nothing you built inside.

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 1d

So many good parts of this, but I really liked this: when it comes to status quo centrist moderate people like Klein, it is very illuminating to realise who they instinctively empathise with and put themselves in the shoes of, and who they consider to be bargaining chips to appease the far right.

By his own admission, Kirk's murder affected Ezra Klein in a personal way that all the previous acts of supremacist violence committed against all its other targets across the span of history did not. So we see that Klein recognizes a "we" in Charlie Kirk that he does not recognize in trans people or in any of the other people I listed in the previous paragraph. In this, he reveals to us—perhaps without even knowing he is doing so—that for him, the disagreements he has with Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro are window dressing compared to the fundamental kinship he feels to them, three princes of public discourse, just trying their best to do what's best, whether "what's best" is feeding a hungry kid or blowing him up or zip tying his hands behind his back in the middle of the Chicago night.

When Klein scolds that "we have to live here with each other" he is making a statement about who it is he is getting ready to live with and who he is getting ready to live without, and most gallingly he is ignoring the fact that when it comes to supremacists all of us have been living with them already all along. Nobody is suggesting mass deportation of white supremacists, or the dissolution of straight marriages, or stripping away health care for conservatives. The troops and the cops weren't ever sent down primarily white streets, masked kidnappers aren't terrorizing white churches or corporate courtrooms. These supremacist hatemongers are being criticized, yes, and opposed, yes, and yes the culture of violence they have created sometimes ricochets back on them, but we are living in the country they demanded on having. We are all now experiencing the Republican proposition for humanity. Many of us are demanding they stop pursuing this proposition, and Republicans and other supremacist hatemongers insist this demand represents violence against them. Klein, by drawing the lines where he draws them, is agreeing with Republicans about this.

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 1d

"In the Klein world, moral clarity about abuse is polarizing, and polarization, not abuse, is the problem to solve."

A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 2d

I wrote about why the regrettable conclusions of Ezra Klein pissed me off so badly in the last couple weeks.

On moral cowardice in an era that calls for clarity, and a popular political instinct to try to solve divisions of abuse by ignoring causes. www.the-reframe.com/eventually-y...

Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something

On accepting the fascist offer and being better than Ezra.

www.the-reframe.com

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 2d

K-Pop Demon Hunters is legitimately the global cultural phenomenon of 2025 and honestly there are far worse things to be a cultural touchstone this year than a trio of young women fighting literal soul-sucking hegemony through the power of their art

E. Perkins 🎃 @hauntedpumpkin.bsky.social · 2d

Oh crap, it's back at #1 in movies again today on Netflix too. That's awesome!

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Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 2d

Absolutely

Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 2d

💜

Andrew Perfors @andyperfors.bsky.social · 2d

Some people's athleticism is just so astonishing it makes me proud to be human. I feel similarly about Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Eliud Kipchoge.

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